


there's no horizon to this open sea (now that i'm giving it another chance)

by johnny-and-dora (sian_jpg)



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: 2x23, F/M, Fluff, One-Shot, that one kiss, you know the one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 09:33:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15216269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sian_jpg/pseuds/johnny-and-dora
Summary: (There’s those butterflies again she’s been trying so hard to push away since yesterday, that light dizzying feeling in her head whenever she thinks about last night and how their lives are so intricately, messily intertwined and how he knows exactly how to cancel out all rational thought in her brain.)(The waves shift closer.)or, the one where the last thing jake & amy want is for everything to change.(during 2x23)





	there's no horizon to this open sea (now that i'm giving it another chance)

**Author's Note:**

> title from lavender by two door cinema club

Amy doesn’t know what she’s doing here.

Maybe she’s taken to taking comfort in the order of the evidence lock-up – weirdly, it’s always been a strange little safe haven for her, not just for when she needs a shame cigarette or just a breather from the overwhelming chaos the bullpen and the detectives of the 99th precinct are often a catalyst for.

She supposes it’s a makeshift fort of sorts, just like her and her brothers used to spend meticulously planning and artfully constructing (Santiago style) when they were kids - of course, this one is comprised of boxes of confiscated drugs and murder weapons and case files, and maybe that shouldn’t make it even more of a second home, but it does.

Maybe it’s a last remaining corner of regulation and stability she can retreat into, counting each breath in and out until she stops feeling like she’s been plunged headfirst into ice cold water.

(There’s something, some quip or smart-ass line in that train of thought about the captain going down with the ship – but that’s all wrong, she thinks. The captain has left for all of ten minutes and the ship is very much going down anyway. This is Amy, hiding from the rest of the world in a makeshift evidence lock-up box fort, with nothing but the slow rise and fall of her chest, feeling like a giant crashing wave of the kind of change she’s been trying to avoid has swept her up off the ship and casually tossed her overboard.)

(Captain Holt is leaving – _has left, past tense_ \- and there’s nothing she can do about it.)

Maybe she likes the satisfaction of everything being in control. Everything has a place in here - every case, every gruesome cop story, every win they’ve celebrated with one too many drinks at Shaw’s (Five-Drink-Amy does love to brag about her felony arrest rates) neatly compartmentalised into walls upon walls of binders and folders and boxes - and maybe it makes it feel like she has a place too.

Maybe there’s comfort to be found  in the dust patterns and the familiar, looping pattern of the blinking lights of the IT server, that tells her that not everything is about to change. Amy sighs a little, rubbing the bridge of her nose, eyes squeezed shut like everything will be back to normal again when she opens them.

Maybe the oppressive cloud hanging over the bullpen for the last hour or so is too much for her, watching her friends reel at the loss of their mentor, watching Rosa look like she wants to punch something even more than usual, watching Jake absent-mindedly play with his rubber band ball as he stares at the empty office and empty desk behind her, paperwork lying half-abandoned in front of him, a weird look on his face she can’t quite decode. She doesn’t dare make eye-contact with him.

Maybe she’s hiding from Jake.

Maybe she’s waiting for him to come find her.

Amy Santiago, is, for all her scrutinising explorations of her countless possible motives, for all her training as one of New York’s finest detectives, never quite able to solve the mystery of why she finds herself standing in the evidence lockup on the fifth floor of Brooklyn’s 99th precinct that afternoon - but later, she decides that the only conclusion she can make from the way her heart leaps when the door opens, the way achingly familiar footsteps find their way into her makeshift fort, the way he knows exactly where to find her -  seems only to point to the idea of fate.

She of course, knows it’s him. She knows before he even cautiously pokes his head around the corner, a small smile on his face that tells her she’s most likely proven his hunch right.

(There’s those butterflies again she’s been trying so hard to push away since yesterday, that light dizzying feeling in her head whenever she thinks about last night and how their lives are so intricately, messily intertwined and how he knows exactly how to cancel out all rational thought in her brain.)  
(The waves shift closer.)

 “Hey.” He says, infinitely quieter and softer than the Jake Peralta she knows, and this is somewhat new. She knows the partner she’s shared a desk with for the best part of five years, the same jackass who constantly teases her and leaves crumbs in case files, the same idiot who’s been spilling his dumb orange soda all over her life ever since the day they met. She knows a sometimes irritating, sometimes charming, sometimes stupidly brilliant detective who never seems to stop moving - and yet this man standing in front of her is strangely still, strangely different, looking straight at her with a kind of soft intensity that nearly sets her alight.

Not that she hasn’t seen this Jake before - he’s the one that smiled at her like that at Charles and Gina’s parents wedding, the one that played the part of a smitten newly engaged fiancé slightly too convincingly last night, the one who kissed her to keep their cover and she kissed back. The one that looked at her _that_ way when he found out she _yes_ , _maybe, a little,_ used to like him back a lifetime ago that doesn’t really feel like that long ago at all. The one who trusts her every instinct and always has her back and _makes her laugh._

Now that she comes to think of it, maybe he isn’t – _maybe all of this isn’t_ \- really that new at all.

“Hey.” She doesn’t let him know that he’s the sole, shining subject of the internal monologue racing through her head at a hundred miles a minute. _Play it cool, Amy._

“Thought I might find you in here.”

There’s that soft, dopey small smile on his face. Her heart throws up a little.

He _knows_ her. He knows where she hides when things get too out of her control; he knows her favourite Polish place she frequents after every long stakeout, and exactly what she orders. He knows what she does on Thursday nights (those weekly budgets won’t plan themselves) and that she plays French horn, and he knows exactly how to piss her off but also when to leave her alone. 

They’re friends – good, close, maybe even best friends, definitely more than the awkward, constantly bickering, teasing colleagues they were even just a couple years ago. He’s someone she would trust with her life, even if (even now) she’d be reluctant to tell him that. He’s so good at complicating things, at being so frustratingly more than just a “cop” she’s sworn off dating.

First and foremost, they’re partners. People connected (albeit somewhat begrudgingly) pretty much since the day they met, whether by the desk they share or the ampersand that connects their names on the arrest report or...something else, something new but somehow nearly always underlying, an electric current coursing through them both which she can’t quite put a name to yet but she’d be lying if she said she didn’t want to find out.  
(Not that she’s going to tell him any of this. Right?)

 “I just needed to process the captain’s news. I feel so bad for him.” She folds her arms, leaning against the shelf as if it’s some kind of moral support, feeling more honest and open about what she’s feeling than she has been in days, to him, to herself.  
The waves shift closer.

“So how’re you holding up?”  
“I don’t know.” Amy shrugs slightly, nose scrunched up.  
“I’m still in shock. You?”

“Um, basically handling it the way I dealt with my dad leaving – just repressing the hell out of it.”

They both smile – it’s different, again, from the jokes he so often makes in desperate attempts to diffuse tension – it’s raw, and honest, and somehow feels a thousand times more intimate. A stark reminder that he’s just as overboard, just as helplessly plunged into ice water as she is with the loss of the captain, another reminder of the seemingly endless connections that tangle them together despite the whole idea of _them_ being intertwined in _police-line-do-not-cross_ tape.

It’s a reminder that they’re more alike than anyone, themselves included, would first believe. The inches between them suddenly feel like less of the ravine they opened up last night and more like...inches, so tiny and insignificant, so easy for her to grab hold of him and probably never let go.

(She did like – She does like Jake, _present tense_ – and the worst part is, there’s definitely something she can do about it, if she’s only brave enough to take another plunge.)

He fidgets with his hands nervously as she folds her arms again, taking a deep and steady and shuddering breath. The air is charged, crackling with potential energy like the skies turning dark at the first signs of a thunderstorm. She nervously casts her eyes anywhere but him, arms folded again, but the irregular rhythms her heart is tapping out instantly gives her away. It may as well be Morse code telling him everything she’s really wanted to say in the whirlwind of the past day.

There’s that magnetism again, drawing them ever closer to each other, like there wasn’t ever going to be any other way, like it was fate that she was hiding here, if she ever found herself believing in that kind of crap.  
The waves shift closer.

Amy still doesn’t really know what she’s doing here, but she’s not going to wait around to find out.

“So, a lot of change around here, huh?”

The tide, looming and large and somewhat inevitable, finally arrives – or, he kisses her, _finally,_ without the guise of _“newly engaged kids”_ to hide behind, without being _Johnny and Dora_ to hide behind, without their extensive list of excuses and disclaimers and afterthoughts. Without inhibition, without second thought, without fear – something terrifyingly new to her, yet so familiar. They are so seemingly right where they belong that, when they break apart, she feels breathless and dizzy and pumped so full of adrenaline she could probably take on every perp in the holding cell at once.

A giant crashing wave of change is sweeping them up, and she should be terrified – but her hands fit so perfectly around him and everything falls so perfectly into place that maybe she’s found what she’s doing here after all.

Of course, because it’s _them_ , she doesn’t get the chance to tell him that, tell him anything, before-

“Hey Jake, the new captain’s here!”

Charles’s voice rings out eagerly from outside the door and she almost laughs at the fifty odd expressions she sees flash on his face in that split second, knowing that an equal amount is mirrored on her own.  For once, they’re both speechless, Amy suddenly hyper-aware of her hands on his chest, still breathless and dizzy, slightly thrown off guard (as usual) by the new yet so achingly familiar guy standing in front of her, who she thinks she would like to get to know a whole lot better.

They don’t need to say anything, of course – every inch of them screams _later_ , _we’ll talk later_ , _we’ll...do this again later_ , and they quickly walk out as inconspicuously as humanly possible, Amy blinking a little in the clinical, harsh light, butterflies fluttering in her stomach, electricity gathering in her fingertips, a huge weight lifted off her chest.

They all gather at the elevator - the absence of two ruthlessly, harshly, so very noticeable - and Amy takes a deep breath, still reeling from the tide, risking a half-glance when she’s sure he’s not looking, trying her hardest to keep a smile off her face.  
The waves shift closer in all their terrifying and exciting and inevitable glory – but she takes another breath as the elevator slides open, and she knows that she’s ready.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! please come keysmash about these nerds with me over on my b99 tumblr @johnny-and-dora <3  
> i'm right in the middle of a b99 rewatch and this episode and this kiss (maybe if you couldn't tell from my url) are both very close to my heart so i hope i did it justice? god bless andy and melissa for acting the fuck out of that scene and giving me so much to write about thank the lord


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